Peter Jackson on The Lovely Bones and Tintin

There are traces of Peter Jackson’s camp-horror roots in his latest film, an adaptation of Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones. They’re in his vertiginous camera work, his extreme fish-eye closeups, his hazy dreamscapes, his over-crisp sound cues, his flair for the lurid, and his uncanny knack for suspense. But other than that, it’s hard to find a thematic element that connects his early works—such as his gross-out gore-fest Bad Taste or his depraved-and-diseased muppet movie, Meet the Feebles—with the story of Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), a bright-eyed 14-year-old girl who watches over her family through the dreamlike prism of the afterlife after she is murdered by a pedophilic maniac (Stanley Tucci). To ask Jackson, the one thing all his movies share is simply that they are movies he wanted to see.

You know how when you read a book you imagine what the movie would look like? Jackson feels the same way, except he can actually go out and shoot that movie. Ever since he made good on the towering gamble that was The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Jackson has had Hollywood at his feet. He is one of the very few working directors who can get virtually any project greenlit. His only real peer, in that sense, is Steven Spielberg. As it happens, the two are currently collaborating on a two-part adaptation of Tintin, the beloved comic book series created in the middle of last century by legendary Belgian cartoonist Hergé.

I ran into Jackson last night at the after-party for the New York premiere of The Lovely Bones, in a corner of the Plaza Hotel’s majestic Oak Room. We spoke of the challenge of depicting the afterlife, Susie’s subconscious, and Hergé’s starkly two-dimensional world.

Building Heaven must have been a daunting enterprise. Did you draw anything from your own subconscious? It almost felt like you took things from my subconscious.

It’s interesting because it’s not heaven. We’re not really showing heaven at all. We’re showing an in-between, and we took the idea that the in-between is really Susie’s dreamlike state. It’s her subconscious. Everybody would experience something completely different; she’s disconnected from her body, and she’s living in this world of dream imagery, for example, as you say, the dream of floating and being underwater. We studied a lot of dream interpretation.

You mean Freud?

It’s Freud, it’s Dalí, it’s all sorts of imagery that we built upon. And that was one of the fun things of taking Susie into this very weird subconscious: having her try to piece together the puzzle of what happened to her body from this weird state. Cause it’s not a practical location. We didn’t regard the in-between as being New York or Paris or London. Not a physical location, but it’s a dreamlike state that she’s in.

I’ve heard that, in dreams, an underwater house generally represents going back to the womb, a regression into early childhood; is that how you interpreted those images?

Usually, they say, a house represents a person. That if you dream about a house, you’re dreaming about a person. So when Susie sees the image of a house in a dead cornfield, to us, the house was actually the killer. It’s Mr. Harvey. And likewise, when Mr. Harvey throws away Susie’s charm bracelet, and he rips off the one little silver charm of the house, that’s his ownership of Susie. That house represents Susie, and it’s almost like her fear of Mr. Harvey keeps her bound to him. And that house is symbolic of that. In order for her to confront Mr. Harvey, she has to go through the door of that house, basically into his mind. And in doing so, she sees those images which are images that only he knows about: his previous victims. So her subconscious is actually entering his subconscious. So that was all part of the fun of it, to map out all of this. It doesn’t really matter if people don’t understand the literal meaning of it. The symbolism was there to make the in-between more than just random images.

It’s almost better that audiences don’t really understand, since that’s how dreams work.

That’s right. They understand it on a subconscious level, but not on a conscious level, yeah.

Do you see a continuum between your riotous early movies, like Bad Taste or Meet the Feebles, and The Lovely Bones? Or do you see this as taking a new direction?

Well I see it as a continuum because I am me. I’m the same person; I haven’t changed. Every film I do, I do because it’s a move that I really want to see. That’s the common thread, is that I make them for myself, really. And reading the novel, and talking to Philippa (Boyens) and Fran (Walsh), who I wrote the script with, and imagining this movie and starting to run it in my mind, it was a movie that I badly wanted to see, just like any of the other movies I made.

Have you ever imagined how the film might have been treated by another filmmaker?

Not really, because, in adapting that book, twenty different filmmakers would make twenty different movies. And that’s the beauty of cinema. It’s always going to be a personal interpretation. That’s what’s great about it: you have so many diverse personalities and types of people making movies. You come to rely on some filmmakers, who you watch no matter what they do, because you know it’s going to be interesting. Other people you’re not so sure about. You know, I think it’s that diversity that’s fascinating.

Finally, I’d like to talk about Tintin. How did you get exposed to the books growing up?

New Zealand is a huge Tintin country. When I grew up, every single house in New Zealand had Tintin books. I think America is the only country that doesn’t really know Tintin. The British Commonwealth knows Tintin very, very well. In New Zealand it was huge. I grew up with The Black Island, and Secret of the Unicorn, Calculus Affair, and King Ottokar’s Scepter. Those were the ones in the bookshelves of my house.

How are the movies going to look?

It’s going to look like Hergé’s comic strips come to life. I mean the design of the movie is exactly as he drew, but rendered in a three-dimensional way. We’re not shooting it live-action. We’re taking his designs and we’re going to render them through motion capture, but they’re going to look like the Tintin characters.